I'm blown away. No, really, it has been so freakin' windy today and I've been out walking in it. Ready for it to be done now. And of course Tug was saying "Woo hoo! Lovin' it!" Steve has a board meeting tonight. I can either read this evening or watch Deadliest Catch and Glee so I'm not sure how it will transpire.
It's Teaser Tuesday!
One of my upcoming reads is THE SCENT OF RAIN AND LIGHTNING by Nancy Pickard. It was just published this week and has 336 pages. This is her most recent book since the fantastic THE VIRGIN OF SMALL PLAINS. Here is an excerpt:
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June 9, 2009
Until she was twenty-six, Jody Linder felt suspicious of happiness.
She hated that about herself, because it tended to sour some otherwise pretty damn fine moments, but this was Rose, Kansas, after all. Only the year before, a pencil tornado had dropped down and killed three people only a few miles from her hometown. A tornado, when the sun was shining! In the winter, there were ice storms. In the summer, there were grass fires. At all times, people she knew went bankrupt, lost their homes, their ranches, their jobs. Or, they died just when you least expected them to. A person could, for instance, belong to a nice family living an ordinary life in a small town in the middle of nowhere, and on some innocent Saturday night, violent men could drop in like those tornadoes and turn those nice people into the dead stars of a Truman Capote book. Such things happened. That wasn't paranoia. It was a terrible fact that Jody knew better than anybody--or at least better than anybody whose father had not been murdered when she was three years old and whose mother had not disappeared the same night.
Such things happened, and she was proof of it.
Therefore--the past having proved to her the unreliability of the present--happiness made Jody Linder anxious. Feelings of safety and security got her checking around corners, lifting lids off bins, and parting shower curtains for fear of what might be hiding there, because you just never knew. A killer could hide in the corner, bugs lurked in bins, spiders jumped out of bathtubs.
Happiness was fragile, precious, and suspect.
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And today perhaps only, a two-fer! Two for Teaser Tuesday!
Also up in my reading TBR, is REVENGER by Rory Clements. This was published last week in the UK. This is 2nd of 2 in series featuring John Shakespeare, elder brother of playwright William Shakespeare and investigator for Queen Elizabeth I, England 1580s-1590s. Here is an excerpt:
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SHAKESPEARE HAD never seen a woman more lovely. His first sight of her was at a distance, in profile, along the evening-shadowed long gallery of Essex House and he was transfixed. The room had fine elmwood panelling and frescoed walls with pictures of nymphs and satyrs in woodland scenes. She was laughing and her fair hair fell back across the soft skin of her nape and shoulder blades. Her neck was adorned by three strings of precious stones that looked to him like diamonds and rubies.
Slyguff walked a step ahead of him, his hand gripped on the hilt of a dagger that was thrust in the belt buckled tight about his narrow, wiry waist.
Only at the last moment, as they came near, did Shakespeare avert his gaze from the woman and see that she was with Charlie McGunn, deep in conversation.
The woman looked up with nonchalant curiosity at Shakespeare’s approach. Her eyes were black, like still, dark water. She raised an eyebrow questioningly. McGunn turned to him, too, and a grin broke across his fleshy, bald face. ‘Ah, Mr Shakespeare, I believe you have seen sense. Welcome to the fold.’
‘Thank you.’
‘I hope you will introduce us, Mr McGunn,’ the woman said.
‘My apologies, Lady Rich. This is Mr Shakespeare. Mr John Shakespeare.’
Shakespeare bowed. ‘My lady.’ Of course, he had seen her portrait. Penelope Rich, sister of the Earl of Essex, was said to be the most beautiful woman at court, if not in the whole of England. It was an assessment which Shakespeare could not dispute.
‘Mr Shakespeare,’ she said, ‘you must be brother to the other Mr Shakespeare, the Earl of Southampton’s poet, for I can see that there is a little family likeness in your eyes and brow, though you are taller.’
‘Indeed, my lady. And I am a little older, too.’
McGunn clasped his arm around Shakespeare’s shoulders. Too tight for friendship. Shakespeare winced at the memory of his vice-like hand taking him by the throat. ‘Mr Shakespeare has agreed to join our great enterprise of all the talents, Lady Rich. He is to seek out and find the mysterious lost colonist, if one such really exists.’
‘Oh, I am sure she exists, Mr McGunn. It is an intriguing tale. Do find her, Mr Shakespeare. I should so like to hear what she has to say for herself, about the perils she has endured in the New World and how she came to make her crossing of the ocean home to England. It will be the talk of the court. And, of course, it is certain to discomfit Ralegh, which will be most amusing.’
‘I will do my utmost.’
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Much love,
PK the Bookeemonster
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